Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2015 i JazzTimes

AT JT, THESE PAST FEW WEEKS HAVE BEEN A PERIOD OF focused, sometimes panicked reflection, and sadness. In mid-June, the avant-garde lost its North Star, saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman. With our editorial deadline looming, we shuffled resources and schedules to make room for a tribute that could possibly do the man justice: a 2006 cover image by John Abbott, taken from the only official studio photo session JT ever conducted with the saxophonist; an elegant appreciation by our columnist, Nate Chinen, that explores Coleman’s strong and abiding humanism; a roundup of remembrances by a handful of his colleagues and acolytes; and my own coverage of his historic public funeral in New York. As veteran JT readers know, we reserve tributes to deceased musicians for our March issue, a measure…

In his 1914 poem “Chicago” Carl Sandburg celebrates the life of what he memorably dubbed the “City of the Big Shoulders”: the stockyards, the railroads, the gangsters, the “Building, breaking, rebuilding.” While Mary Morris’ affecting new novel, The Jazz Palace (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), reprises most of the poet’s catalog of urban dynamism, it’s what he leaves outjazz—that Morris places at the heart of a story set in Chicago during the 1920s. It was an era when the city was being transformed by waves of Eastern-European immigrants, fleeing poverty and pogroms, who crowded the tenements of the city’s North Side, and by African-Americans from the South, escaping Jim Crow and the lynch mobs, who settled on the South Side. The character she created to serve as a bridge between these two…

In June, the Blue Note Entertainment Group announced the impending opening of new Blue Note Jazz Club venues in Beijing and Waikiki, Hawaii. The organization owns, manages and licenses 10 music spaces around the globe, including the Blue Note Jazz Clubs in New York, Japan and Milan. Additional locations will open in Shanghai and Taipei, Taiwan, within the next three years. Jazz at Lincoln Center recently launched a companion record label through Sony Music, Blue Engine Records, described in a press release as “a new platform to make [JALC’s] vast archive of recorded concerts available to jazz audiences everywhere.” The label will also release new live and studio recordings. In June, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation announced the recipients of its 2015 Doris Duke Impact Awards, including seven jazz-oriented musician-composers,…

Ornette Coleman, who died on June 11 at 85, received due credit in his time: as an alto saxophonist of singular impact, a composer-bandleader of restless purpose and an all-around trailblazer, the man who did more than anyone to blow open modern jazz’s orthodoxies of style. A recipient of the first Guggenheim Fellowship for jazz composition in 1967, he later became a MacArthur Fellow, an NEA Jazz Master and the winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Still, there remained to the end an air of the maverick about Coleman. “He was seen as a native avant-gardist” wrote Ben Ratliff in a front-page obituary for the New York Times, “personifying the American independent will as much as any artist of the last century.” To my…

FRED HERSCH SOLO (Palmetto) Fred Hersch made his first solo piano recording in 1993. It was Volume 31 in Concord’s Maybeck Recital Hall Series, which eventually reached 42 titles. Today, when solo jazz piano lacks this level of support, Hersch perseveres, a keeper of the flame. He has now made 10 solo albums, four of them live. Three of those, including this new one, are what Hersch calls “found objects.” They come from concerts when he did not know he was being recorded. Solo is a performance in the Windham Civic Center (once a church) in Windham, N.Y. Hersch is a naturally elegant, erudite improviser who thinks in terms of overall governing form. But on this night, his passion causes songs to spill free. He sounds impulsive, daring and bursting…

BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET COLTRANE’S A LOVE SUPREME: LIVE IN AMSTERDAM (OKeh/Marsalis) Branford Marsalis’ 2002 album, Footsteps of Our Fathers, which included his quartet’s recitation of John Coltrane’s four-part suite A Love Supreme, drew mostly favorable reviews, though at least one critic (ahem) found it stiff, emotionless and unnecessary. Fifteen months after recording Footsteps, however, the Branford Marsalis Quartet gave a performance of A Love Supreme at an Amsterdam concert hall that amounted to a stunning tour de force. Originally released on DVD in 2004, that concert has been reissued as a CD/DVD set to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Coltrane’s watershed recording. The quartet—Marsalis exclusively on tenor saxophone, with pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts—is more spirited, more powerful and more expansive than on the…

› PAUL BLEY, pianist The word “genius” comes to mind with reference to Ornette Coleman—no question about it. He taught me how to play. Before Ornette, you could make a living playing in someone else’s style—I was playing Bud Powell and so forth. Ornette drew a line in the sand. Our time at the Hillcrest Club [in 1958] was so monumental. The club would be full, packed even, for our band, but when Ornette started playing, the street in front of the club would suddenly fill up with people waiting for him to stop playing because they didn’t know what had hit them! When someone can influence the whole world of music, “genius” may actually be too small a word! He changed the course of all of musical improvising: There’s…

LENY ANDRADE Iluminados (Enlightened): Leny Andrade Canta Ivan Lins & Vítor Martins (Diebold, 2014) This recent album finds Andrade’s thick, husky voice heavier than ever with worldly wisdom yet featherweight during the singer’s jazzy flights. Here she delves into 11 classics by a historic Brazilian songwriting duo. Lyricist Martins writes profoundly of love, human nature and politics; Lins’ music combines ultimate harmonic sophistication with hooks that are hard to forget. The musicians, including guitarist Leonardo Amuedo, pianist Fernando Merlino and drummer Téo Lima, inspire Andrade at every turn. LEANDRO BRAGA TRIO Fé Cega (Blind Faith) (Facil Brazil, 2013) Rio-based pianist and arranger Braga writes luscious orchestrations for Brazil’s greatest singers. But on this album, produced by Zé Nogueira, Braga, along with bassist Bruno Migliari and percussionist Marco Lobo,…

I first experienced tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson’s playing on the 1966 Lee Morgan record Delightfulee— a record I literally stole from my parents’ basement. With some musicians, hearing them as a sideman on just half of an album—the other half of Delightfulee features a large ensemble playing arrangements by Oliver Nelson—might seem like a small sample, but, oddly, Henderson can sound more like himself on other people’s records. In fact, his most iconic turns happen on other people’s records: Morgan, Kenny Dorham, Larry Young, McCoy Tyner, Nat Adderley. In each case he morphs himself, channeling many modes of playing, reflecting the language of the musicians around him. During my studies with George Russell, I found that Henderson seemed to reflect a lot of the values in Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept…

Claude Thornhill & His Orchestra “HANG OUT THE STARS IN INDIANA” (Evans, arranger) The Transcription Performances 1947 (HEP, 1999) Evans was a master at utilizing the element of surprise. I love how he has the band play a whole chorus by itself, slightly re-harmonizing each A section, adding a little more chromatic dissonance as the tune progresses. After two minutes, when you are convinced this is an instrumental arrangement, Evans surprises you with a modulation that brings in the vocalist. The Teddy Charles Tentet “YOU GO TO MY HEAD” (Evans, arranger) The Teddy Charles Tentet (Atlantic, 1956) It is remarkable how every moment of this arrangement seems fresh and new, given how economic Evans is with his writing. The instrumentation is so spare: five horns (trumpet, alto, tenor, bari, tuba)…

Ornette Coleman, the alto saxophonist and composer who led the jazz avant-garde while also revolutionizing the music’s mainstream, died June 11 in Manhattan. The cause of death was cardiac arrest. Coleman was 85. For more on the music and legacy of this jazz giant, see this issue’s cover story beginning on p. 26 and coverage of Coleman’s funeral on p. 10. Gunther Schuller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, conductor, musician, writer and educator best known as the architect of the Third Stream, a concept and term he created in 1957 to describe the fusing of jazz and classical music, died June 21 in Boston. The cause was leukemia. He was 89. Masabumi Kikuchi, a lyrical, emotive pianist who played with Lionel Hampton, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Elvin Jones, Gil Evans and…

Like any self-respecting mad scientist, Scott Robinson, 56, hides his secret lab away from prying eyes. The headquarters of ScienSonic Laboratories is cleverly disguised as a quaint, well-manicured suburban home in Teaneck, N.J. Look more closely at the heavy wooden doors of the converted two-car garage—guarded by Robinson’s pet rabbit, Tribble, in an attached “rabbitat”—and you’ll notice a small plaque reading “Lab A: Sonic Research.” Inside is a variety of strange devices and apparatuses that would make any Frankenstein or Moreau proud, albeit with more strings, bells and horns. The Jersey-born, Virginia-raised saxophonist has been toiling in this space since 2007 to create “Worlds of Tomorrow Through Sound” The equipment in this laboratory consists of hundreds of unusual instruments collected by Robinson over decades spent scouring flea markets and junk…

In honor of JazzTimes’ 45th anniversary, we polled nearly 60 top musicians and JT writers to come up with a list of the 45 Greatest Small Groups in Jazz History. Participants were asked to provide a ballot ranking between five and 10 bands, trios through nonets, that they believe uphold the principles of the best improvising units—concepts like communication, empathy and a unique confluence of individual personalities. Dates have been added to denote specific lineups of ensembles that shifted personnel throughout their existence, and the first 20 entries feature commentary from artists and critics. Feel free to applaud or berate, but know that the verdict is still out: Starting Aug. 4, we’ll be conducting a companion readers’ poll at JazzTimes.com. 1. JOHN COLTRANE: THE CLASSIC QUARTET (Coltrane, saxophone/McCoy Tyner, piano/…

Jazz Session Trainer Simply put, Larry Dunlap’s Jazz Session Trainer (Hal Leonard), a 127-page book with audio-download code, is an essential text for aspiring improvisers: It deserves a spot on the music stand next to the Real Book, the Bird Omnibook and your method books of choice. In authoritative yet inviting prose, he advises on jam-session etiquette, provides a compendium of etudes and licks for study, discusses common intros and endings you’ll hear at sessions, and offers tips on constructing an efficient practice regimen. Finally, clean chord charts (no melodies) and rhythm-section play-along tracks are included for 50 must-know tunes. Spend some time with the Trainer before you write your name down on the sign-up sheet. ($24.99) halleonard.com New From PRS One of the best special events related to a…